HP Printer Drivers 5.1 are malware?

Sometime in the last few days, either Apple or HP seems to have broken most of HP's printers for the Mac--if the comments on the HP forums are any indication.

I have two MacOS systems, one is 10.14.6 and the other is 10.15.7. Both stopped printing at the same time. The Error Log message on both computers was "[cups-deviced] (hpfax) crashed on signal 9!"

The 10.14.6 machine will queue the print job, but never sends it to the printer. This even happens when trying to print a test page from the the Apple "PrinterProxy (571)".

The 10.15.7 machine will not queue the print job, instead it says that some HP driver file will harm my computer, and then proceeds to report the incident to Apple.

I got the same behavior before and after installing the file downloaded from HP's web site and recommended here in an apple KB article, "HPPrinterDivers5.1.dmg". I was asked if I wanted to install that driver, since it had an outdated certificate--I did anyway.

This happens on two Mac laptops with two different OS versions, and happened at the same time. I can still se the web page served by the printer over my network, and I can still print test pages from that web page (which are generated internally in the printer).

Posted on Oct 23, 2020 11:25 AM

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John Galt

Level 10

155,492 points

Posted on Oct 23, 2020 1:21 PM

I was asked if I wanted to install that driver, since it had an outdated certificate--I did anyway.

Apple admonishes its users not to install drivers, so you and everyone else who did may be suffering from the effects of using a certificate that has expired.

Refer to Add a printer on Mac - Apple Support.

I do not profess to know what the underlying cause may turn out to be, but Apple has been inexorably pushing everyone to use AirPrint for about a decade now. At present it seems to affect only HP drivers. If your HP printer is AirPrint-enabled, then remove the existing print queue and add it again as an AirPrint printer.

If it is not AirPrint-enabled, this event may portend the end of support for them. As I wrote I don't know for certain.

The dialog box is certainly misleading. A driver downloaded from HP certainly isn't malware, but these days it seems anything that doesn't conform to Apple's iron-clad security requirements might as well be. We'll have to just wait to see how Apple and HP resolve it, assuming either one is motivated to do that.

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HP Printer Drivers 5.1 are malware?

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